Well, my MythBox, which has been running Ubuntu Feisty has failed me. It seems to have been a bug in the 2.16.20 kernel. The main thrust of the bug was that it screwed with the I/O (read/write) to the hard disk. The first noticeable problem was at three weeks after the upgrade from Edgy because my /home partition (JFS for the very large video files) crashed. I was able to recover the log, but I thought the problem was in the JFS package. After ten days of research, I discovered that it wasn’t JFS (which hasn’t had any major upgrades for quite a while) but the kernel package. So, I contemplated my two options: upgrade to the 2.16.21 kernel (which was in gutsy) or downgrade back to Edgy. It’s nearly impossible to manually downgrade Ubuntu without having a lot of headache, so I chose the upgrade path (after all, my main computer runs Debian unstable with a few experimental packages). During the upgrade, apt-get choked on a disk I/O and the system is no longer bootable. Joy.
Since I now have to reinstall the system (and hopefully recover the pertinent data from my /var and /home partitions), I did some more research. My first priority was remain in the Debian-based system. Second was having a very stable system with less frequent updates (this was, for all intents and purposes, a server environment in which cutting edge is unnecessary). Some things I would need on this box: MySQL server, Apache, PHP, MythTV (of course), Subversion, an FTP daemon, and a SSH daemon. Right off, most MythTV-specific distros were out because they make it somewhat difficult to install other programs/packages. Ubuntu was out because this was the second time I’ve had some major problems with it. So, I settled on Debian stable. It has all the packages I want/need, and it’s super-stable. I’ve not have a bad experience with Debian stable (Debian testing, on the other hand…). SO, during whatever free time I may have this week, I will be re-installing old faithful.
